


A Starved Heart

by Leni



Category: Gone With the Wind
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 20:25:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2745818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leni/pseuds/Leni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rhett Butler is not a jealous man.</p>
<p>Except when he is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Starved Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EffingEden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EffingEden/gifts).



> Written for Effingeden at [Comment Fic](http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/491617.html?thread=73043041&). Prompt: **Jealousy is what happens when the heart starves**.

Fond of him.

That's what both the shock of his proposal and her tipsiness had dragged out of Scarlett, that night. How _useful_ , Rhett remembered thinking, when Scarlett either scorned or pitied (almost) everyone. Fondness would make a good start of their marriage, he'd believed. And as a start, it hadn't been too bad. Their honeymoon had been everything he'd envisioned, spoiling her until she forgot her troubles.

But then they'd returned to Atlanta. To the mills. To Wilkes.

And slowly, as week after week passed, and then months and Scarlett refused to give up her old habits, Rhett grew to recognize his jealousy as a steady companion.

He wasn't as foolish as to be jealous of the time his _fond_ wife dedicated to her work. Leave that to the insecure and the confused like Frank Kennedy. Her last husband, God rest his soul, hadn't understood Scarlett's devotion, much less her fears should she fail. Instead Rhett had watched as she built those mills from nothing, and he never would have allowed her to fail. When she hadn't needed his help, he'd shared in her pride.

He still did, even when she spent hours over her accounts instead of in the easy conversations that had marked the early years of their acquaintanceship.

Neither was he jealous of Ashley, not more than the slow burn that bothered him when Scarlett's expression softened as she looked away from him, or the helplessness that filled him when her green eyes grew dreamy and suddenly his wife wasn't in the room with him, but revisiting years past in that plantation of hers, when she could still have made a suitor out of the neighbor's heir.

But those were Scarlett's dreams, which would never come to reality as long as Melanie Wilkes drew breath. Even when she brought those dreams to their bed, Rhett had learned to bear the burden. No, he had no true reason to be jealous of Wilkes; the other man would never have Scarlett. But to be angry at him? To feel contempt for the man's weakness?

Oh, most of his anger was directed at the fond wife who daydreamed another man in her husband's place, at her blind foolishness. But Ashley deserved nothing but Rhett's pity, for not being strong enough to live without Scarlett's adoration, for not having brought an enamored teenager down to cold reality with a few words and a truthful confession of how he'd never love Scarlett as he loved his wife.

Even a fool could see that Ashley's honor was stronger than his lusts, and yet there went Mrs. Butler, making a fool of herself by mistaking that lust for more tender feelings.

A stubborn woman, this fond wife of his; blind to everything but her obsession... 

And with every week, with every month, Rhett felt as his marriage slipped further away from his control. For years, he'd bargained for crumbs of her attention. How had he forgotten that Scarlett's husbands had never gotten even that much, that she'd gleefully left them to be starved before they marched off to their graves?

So, yes, Rhett Butler was jealous.

But not of her work, and not of the insipid man who clung to Scarlett like a dog in the manger. Those were obstacles that he'd long made his peace with.

Instead Rhett remembered their times together at Peachtree House during the war, their walks outside, their dances that had scandalized the town so gratifyingly, their hours as he drove her from the mills to her home...

How couldn't he be jealous?

He was jealous of the man he'd been, that man who had somehow earned Scarlett's fondness. A besotted fool who hadn't realized this marriage would be nothing but a losing battle. 

Lucky fellow, indeed! 

 

The End  
09/12/14


End file.
